Escape From Evil (38 page)

Peter Tobin, he said, had lured two fourteen-year-old girls back to his flat in Leigh Park, where he had plied them with cider and vodka and violently raped them. He had then tied them up and left the flat.

What the policeman didn’t tell me then, but which I learnt subsequently, was that Peter had sodomized one of the girls with a knife, beaten them black and blue, then turned on the gas and left them to die in the flat. He’d just jumped in his blue Metro and driven away, moments after handing my son over to me. Fortunately, one of the girls had wriggled free and called a neighbour for help.

Later I would spend hours crying about those poor girls, but my initial reaction was utter disbelief. News like that is almost too big for the brain to process. At first my mind just went blank, but then the questions poured out.

‘Are you sure?’ I heard myself say, but I knew the answer even before it was confirmed.

‘Well, when did this happen?’ I said.

‘Yesterday. Last night.’

I froze in my seat.

‘But my son was there!’

And then, I’m afraid to say, all thought of those girls went temporarily out of my head. I just wanted to hug Daniel.

‘We don’t think he was involved, but we’ll know more when the victims are well enough to be interviewed. One of them is in a coma.’

A coma! My God, Peter, what have you done?

Even hearing the outline of the horrific events of that night had me in tears. There would be many, many more to come. But right now the police needed my help.

‘Your husband is on the run. Is there anywhere you think he might have gone?’

‘I don’t know what he does with his time.’

‘Please think: any friends, relatives, just tell us everything you can.’

It was hard to concentrate on addresses while still trying to process everything that had happened. Apart from Peter’s access to Daniel, I had no interest in his life whatsoever. But I came up with some names and addresses – people like his friend John, his sister and brothers and a couple of pubs and cafés in Brighton and Portsmouth where we’d been a few times. In the end, I just handed over my address book.

‘Is there anything else?’ the policeman asked. I desperately wanted to help, but the answer was no.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about him.’

Realizing that everything you know about someone is a lie takes some processing. When that person is your husband and the father of your child, it defies logic.

I don’t know him at all. I never have.

The truth was, however, that I had always known Peter was a man of violence. I knew too that he believed somehow that the world owed him a living and that he was entitled to take whatever he wanted. And I also knew, from my own experiences, that he relished imposing his sadistic will on younger women.

That realization tore me to shreds. The idea that there might have been a chance I could have prevented those girls from being attacked was a heavy burden. But the more I tortured myself over my role in this, the more I realized how he had distorted everything.

When he’d punished me for lazy cleaning or criticized my cooking, I’d always felt that it was my fault, that I’d driven him to it. It wasn’t a case of me deserving punishment, but there was a cause and effect in play. My behaviour was the cause. He’d conditioned me to accept the blame for everything. Whether I liked it or not, I was the reason he behaved in the manner he did. Even when he’d brought Lisa and the other girls into our home, that was in some way a result of my actions. I wasn’t sleeping with him, so he was forced to go elsewhere. That’s how he justified it to us both.

And then there was Daniel. When I’d seen Peter hold my son above the staircase in Robertson Avenue, I truly believed that he was capable of killing. It was only when I’d escaped and had time to analyse events that I realized it was never about hurting Daniel. Daniel was just a weapon, a tool to control me with. Daniel was my weak spot and Peter exploited that. Everything he ever did during that relationship was just because he wanted to own me.

It never, for one moment, occurred to me that Peter was capable of behaving like this to other people. He’d bullied and abused me for so long, I genuinely felt it was all about me. When, in fact, it was all about him.

From the moment the police told me about the events of the previous night, I had only one thought on my mind.
I have to get Daniel.
I was assured he was safe, that if Peter had wanted to harm him, he would have done the night before. But that wasn’t the point. I needed to be with him, to wrap my arms around him. I didn’t know at that point half the things he’d witnessed, but I did know he would need my help to get over it.

Daniel’s school was in Havant, so it was a short journey to pick him up. Even so, I still had plenty of time to curse myself for not noticing anything the night before. Were there clues? Had I missed anything? I’d put Daniel’s silence down to tiredness, which was natural, and again that morning. But had there been blood on him? Had he been scared? Had he tried to tell me something? We were in such a rush, I hadn’t noticed anything.

When I reached the school Daniel was ready. As soon as I picked him up, I immediately felt him go stiff. He never did that. By the time I got him back to Liverpool Road, I was convinced something was wrong. He was aggressive, shouting things he’d normally say nicely – ‘Where’s my drink?’ ‘I need that!’ – and the moment he got inside the front door, he hit me. My son had never hit me before in his life.

‘Daniel, calm down! What’s wrong?’

But I already knew the answer.

When the police were able to interview the girls, the full story emerged. The fourteen-year-olds had knocked on Peter’s second-floor door to ask if he knew when their relative – his neighbour – would be back. ‘Any minute now,’ Peter had said. ‘Come in and wait.’ He even suggested they could play with Daniel, which, of course, put them completely at ease. And so began sixteen hours of torment and torture that neither girl would ever forget.

As soon as the door was closed, Peter pulled out a sharp breadknife and forced the girls to drink vodka, wine and cider and swallow pills – or else. One of them passed out quickly. The other was sick, then tried to fight. That was when Peter turned nasty. He’d raped the girl, then sodomized her.

The only good thing from my point of view was that Daniel was sent to his room first. Apparently, he’d watched
The Terminator
, which normally I would have hated. On this occasion, it was better than what was going on in the room next door.

But that hadn’t been the end of it for him. The girl who’d fought back had managed to twist Peter’s arm so the breadknife cut into his calf. That’s when he called for my son, my precious son, to fetch ice from the freezer to stem the bleeding. Peter could have gone himself, I know he could. When I’d seen him later that night there was nothing wrong with his leg. But for some reason he wanted my terrified four-year-old to come out, to see what was going on, to be involved. Daniel had to go right over to where the naked girl was writhing and sobbing in agony and watch while his dad shouted at her to be quiet. He had to stand there, shaking, while Peter clumsily packed ice onto his wound. And all the while he couldn’t take his eyes off the knife in his dad’s hand.

Apparently, the girl begged him for help. But what could Daniel do? He was four years old and traumatized by what he saw. As soon as he could, he ran back into his room and tried to drown out the screams with Arnie Schwarzenegger.

The guilt at not picking up on any signs my son had shown was nothing, though, compared to the anxiety that filled me over what might have been. If Peter was capable of stabbing and torturing strangers, then he was more than capable of doing it to family. What would have happened if the girls hadn’t entered Peter’s flat? Would the bloodlust have still been there? Would he have found someone else?

Or would he have taken it out on Daniel?

Not knowing is a dangerous place to be. Your brain needs information that you just don’t have. So you start to invent things, nightmare scenarios that get worse and worse with every run-through. You start to obsess about the ‘what ifs’ and then you start looking for the clues that were never there. At a time when I should have been concentrating on my son and the future, my only thought was for the past. It was typical of Peter that, two years after I’d left him, he still had the power to completely screw up my mind.

However, it was Daniel’s mind I was most concerned about. No human being should witness the things he’d endured, much less a child. He was four, so he wouldn’t understand rape and alcohol. He saw the girls crying and screaming and he knew they were hurt. But imagine how it looked to him. Every child instinctively believes their parents are right. Look how I’d blindly followed my mother’s crazy plans and been completely unaware that how we were living wasn’t normal. I’d laid lino, rolled joints, skipped school till I was seven and I didn’t have a clue it was wrong. It was the same for Daniel, but far, far worse.

Daniel hated seeing those girls get hurt. It felt wrong hearing their cries, but Daddy wouldn’t do anything wrong, would he? That’s how we’re programmed to think. Daddy was trying to stop them crying. He was angry that they kept screaming. But the girls wouldn’t stop.

There are so many things to hate Peter for that it’s hard to separate them. Even suggesting to Daniel that what he was doing was okay was unforgiveable, but that was something we could get over in time.

The thing I still to this day can’t forgive Peter for is making Daniel feel guilty. Without him, without the bait of playing with him while they waited, those girls might never have gone into that flat. Maybe Peter would have come up with a different temptation, we don’t know. But the girls had naturally assumed that a father of a young boy was safe, someone they could trust. They’d taken one look at my son and decided he might be fun to look after – and look where it had got them. Daniel had to live with that. Thirteen years later, however, the tables would be turned.

I had no idea when I’d picked Daniel up from Peter’s flat in the dead of night that that would be the last time my son would ever see his father. How I wish I’d made the decision earlier. I still had full legal custody. If I’d wanted to, I could have enforced the court’s exclusion zone. But there was always that fire in me to give my son the father I’d never had. It was a mistake and one I will never forgive myself for. I can only say that I did it for the right reasons.

The police were very gentle with Daniel, I have to say, and he began having therapy very soon after we realized what he’d seen. We were introduced to the wonderful Rhona Lucas, the head of the Child Protection counselling division, who promised to work with Daniel for however long it took to purge the experiences from his system. I wasn’t allowed into the room, but I could watch through a two-way mirror. Rhona worked wonders. Each session, I saw the anger diminish and more and more of my little boy return. After six weeks, he was back. No shouting, no anger, no hitting. My innocent angel was home.

I don’t think Daniel remembers the therapy and we have never spoken about those events. He’s put them behind him and I’ve done my absolute best to protect him from ever being reminded of them – starting with my decision to hide the real reason his father was in prison. The sooner Daniel was able to push the terrible things he’d witnessed in Havant from his mind, the quicker he’d be able to move on. That’s why I told him that Peter was in trouble for having drugs. It was nothing to do with knives or rapes or attacks on young girls. When he thought of his father, as I knew he would from time to time, I didn’t want his head to automatically be filled with those images of sickening violence.

Back in 1994, though, there were plenty of other people who wanted to obsess about the horrors of that night in Havant and their repercussions. It didn’t help that every day the local papers and TV news seemed to talk about nothing else. Every detail of the case was gone over. The main focus, though, was on the whereabouts of the rapist Peter Tobin.

The police were convinced he would contact me. Even though we were separated and I’d moved on with another partner, they felt I was pivotal to their hopes of capturing him. I didn’t have a clue how Peter’s mind worked, but I’d seen enough films where the criminal wants to get rid of any witnesses. Daniel had seen things. We were both at risk.

I couldn’t be too scared though. A panic button was installed by my front door and I was given another one to carry around. One press of that button and the whole of Hampshire’s police force would descend on Liverpool Road. On top of that, the police asked if they could tap my phone line. You have to get permission from the Home Secretary for that, I was told. I didn’t think Peter would call, but I had no problem with it. On the plus side, it meant there were burly police technicians and officers swarming over the place every hour of the day. I’d probably never felt safer.

Then, about six weeks after the attacks, I finally received word from Havant police station. Two officers had been strolling past a café on St James Street in Brighton, one of the old haunts I had told them we used to drink in. They’d recognized the man nursing a cup of tea without an apparent care in the world as Peter Tobin and arrested him on the spot.

‘Thanks to you, Cathy, we’ve got him.’

I was glad to have been of help, but I couldn’t celebrate. I just felt numb.